


A Fishy Business

by cherrylng



Category: Muse (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Fish, Fish & Chips, Fish Puns, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 05:53:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14610897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrylng/pseuds/cherrylng
Summary: A young Matt Bellamy in his 5th year at Teignmouth Community College is forced into a yearlong contest project to be a young entrepreneur. So he decides to sell fish and be a mediocre fishmonger. Unfortunately for Matt, things don't go his way. Or rather, he wonders where did it gorightfor him?





	A Fishy Business

**Author's Note:**

> I have been reading crack fics since last week, which urged me onto trying out on writing something humourous to be read on Museslash. Enjoy and comment!

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship is an annual project and contest for schools within the local government district of Teignbridge, with Teignmouth Community College being one of them. Funded by various local businesses and the town mayor to showcase and have students to try out and show off their sense of entrepreneurship.   
  
The project provides startup funds for students in order to help kick start their businesses and an award at the end of the school term for those that have become the most successful. Starting only a decade ago, it has since seen a few students later starting up businesses of their own ever since they participated into the contest.  
  
Each year, starting from those entering their fifth year, students are allowed to register into the nearly yearlong project, with some added benefits of having an allotted amount of time that they can stay out of classes and the project giving them a credit score to their personal records.   
  
Sometimes, however, there’s less people that are eager to register themselves to the project in some years. To counter that problem, there’s an odd little clause in the rules that states that each classroom needs a certain amount of students to make sure that the quota is met.   
  
The classroom that Matt is in is one of them. With not enough students in the class that are interested in joining it, the head teacher decides to do a random selection to pick the last few students into joining the contest. Unfortunately for Matt, he was picked amongst it.  
  
Matt Bellamy is not a student that likes to be forced into things, especially ones where he shows absolutely no interest in wanting to participate in a project that spans his entire fifth year school term.  
  
Deciding that he’s going to show how so little of care that he cares about this project, Matt writes down on the paper that he is going to sell fish.   
  
The teacher -after taking a look at the paper and raised her eyebrows at what Matt wrote- tried to persuade him to go for another alternative, but Matt puts his foot down. He got forced into this contest that he didn’t want to be in and if he decides to sell fish then he is going to sell fish. At least he wasn’t daft enough to write down selling alcohol because he is well aware that that was grounds for too much trouble.  
  
To show how much he’s committing himself into the farce that he’s putting on for the Spirit of Entrepreneurship, Matt sets off down to the harbour with his best friends in tow.   
  
“Matt, are you really going into this whole fishmonger business head first?” asked a skeptical Dom. “Do you even know how to sell fish?”  
  
“It’s basically buying the supplies from the fishermen and selling them off,” Matt says with a shrug. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”  
  
“You’re actually buying off from wholesalers than from fishermen,” Tom corrected him.  
  
“I don’t really care. And I don’t care what I’m going to earn from it.”  
  
Using the startup money provided, Matt buys from the wholesalers the cheapest fishes that he can get to put into ice containers that he had borrowed off from his dad, who was bemused by his son’s idea of selling fish. The fishes that he brought are bycatch, with some others that can’t be sold due to being too small, too ugly, or unsure if truly edible.  
  
He even gets the scraps like fish heads, discarded roe, and bones that are usually thrown away for free to add into what he refers to as his fishy inventory.   
  
Matt sets up his mobile shop at school, at home, at the Den, at wherever he goes with his bicycle and ice containers full of fish. There wasn’t a set pattern of what he does and where he goes other than a price list for what he has in hand and it was done on purpose that way.   
  
He tells to anyone willing to listen that he sells the whole fish, not bothering to descale or fillet the fishes into pieces to sell it in cut pieces. Although the scraps that he had gotten are left to be, packaged neatly to separate the roe from the fish heads.  
  
He has no care for business acumen. If there are people willing to buy fish off of him, then they better put up with doing all that work of preparing the fishes at home by themselves, for he was just doing this whole business for a laugh. He doesn’t care if he could barely earn a pittance over the year for this.  
  
At first, it was just a few friends and students that bought the cheaper, smaller fishes for a laugh, to which Matt doesn’t care of what they’re going to do with the fishes they brought from him because he got money off of them. So tit for tat.  
  
The rest that he didn’t sell by the end of the week is given to his family and to Dom, Chris, and Tom who help along in his business to make a meal out of it. His Nan made a nice fish pie for dinner from an ugly looking fish with terrifyingly sharp teeth from the stockpile.  
  
Then slowly, much to Matt’s consternation, more and more people are buying fish off of him, and are actually not doing it for laughs.   
  
At first, it was just mates that bought his fishes because he’s the only student in the whole school to be ludicrous enough to sell fish compared to most other students who sell stuff like home baked cookies and lemonade or offer mundane services like washing cars.   
  
Then some other students and a couple of teachers start to buy fishes from him at the end of classes because he’s selling it dirt cheap and can be brought home to be cooked.   
  
The fish heads and roe are harder to sell off, although for some reason the local Chinese restaurant is more than happy to buy it off from Matt when he got called by the owners while passing by their shop one day to check on what he sells. Matt has no clue of what the owners are going to do with the scraps, but Chinese and Indian restaurants were always serving exotic authentic stuff behind the backs of their Western customers anyway, so out of sight, out of mind.  
  
Then slowly, as weeks passed since he started his fishmongering business, he notices that he has regular customers. Actual people who return from time to time to buy fish off of him. Soon, he has delivery runs for those who kept asking if he can bring his fishes to their homes. Even the Chinese restaurant owner is asking him if he does regular deliveries of fish heads and roe and the owner is willing to pay him considerably to make him think otherwise from not doing the deliveries.  
  
It becomes really prominent to Matt when the lunch ladies from school decide to buy his fishes and promise that they will buy it off him every week to use for fish and chips that are usually served on Fridays. Understandably, Matt is much more reluctant on eating fish and chips come Friday, knowing exactly where the battered fish came from. And worse, the lunch ladies did stick to their promise.  
  
Months into his fishmonger business, one of the wholesalers have enticed Matt into try selling marinated oysters and mussels that they have in supply. Interested, Matt buys some. The processed stuff is much cheaper than the fresh ones, so he buys that. He’s rather tired of selling fish all the time. Plus. he gets to eat the shellfish if not many people bought it.  
  
He is not diversifying his trade, as much as Dom and Tom and Chris point it out and have been helping him stock up and sell fishes. It would be nice to have something different once in a while.  
  
Frustratingly, people actually buy the marinated oysters and mussels from him, often selling out before the end of the week. They are happy in that according to them, he is introducing more into his catalogue and driving more customers towards his oceanic wares.  
  
However, after months since he started his business, Matt is not going to complain about it. He earned just enough that no one will bother him about his joke of selling fish anymore, especially by the skeptics in school. Even though he did started out with this just to deliberately fail in a project that he was forced into.  
  
One fine Spring, when Matt went down to the harbour to buy his supplies as per usual, he keeps hearing rumours and small talk about some impending strike from the wholesalers and fishermen. He didn’t think much about the concerns of it.   
  
The next day, he finds out that the fishermen have gone on strike. As in the whole of Britain’s fishermen are on strike due to low wages and are making this uncertain on when the strike will end.   
  
Soon, the whole country, even Teignmouth is in a crisis for lack of supply of seafood to provide for the town. The fish and chip shops would run out of their fish supplies within a week without rationing. People bought out all the frozen seafoods available in supermarkets. Imported seafoods have risen in their prices.  
  
The fishermen, both those in unions and those not part of the union, were striking and not going out to the seas, but they were giving away of what they’ve caught before the strike. Albeit the fish that they gave away are not commercially popular fish, but rather fishes that were picked up by trawling from the bottom of the sea. They formed the majority of what is caught in the trawlers, but being nonviable for commercial sales, these fishes are regarded as bycatch or trash fish.  
  
Matt is still the only one in the town who sells such fish, since there’s no one stopping him from picking any bycatch up from the fishermen and the wholesalers. But nonetheless, the one advantage that he has is that he could tell apart white fish and oily fish due to his experience from selling his trash fish with his best friends for months now.  
  
Suddenly, Matt finds himself hounded by people buying fish and other seafoods off of him, to the point that he had to recruit several of his mates to help him with a now massive operation that he had ended up with, and now buying off more trash fish and bycatch from wholesalers or fishermen not part of the strike. They were more than happy to do so since it meant that they can skip classes without getting their marks deducted  _and_  get some salary earned from it.  
  
In fairness, Matt could have not done his business at any time during the strike out of his own reasons, of any reasons. Hell, he could have even sabotaged his own business. But somehow, he got distracted in having to  _run_  a business that got a sudden upturn in its customer base, teaching his classmates to tell apart which fish is white or oily types because they kept asking him, needing more people in his stead to help him deal with an operation far too big for a teenager and his friends to run.   
  
At one point, Matt is surprised when he sat down for lunch at school and Dom joins him at the table to inform him that he had managed to help him secure and rent a warehouse down by the docks to move their operations down to a bigger space than Dom’s garage in order to gain better facilities and accommodate the larger staff that they now have.  
  
“Wait—since when did you decide that you’re helping my business like some business partner? How can we even afford to rent a warehouse?!” exclaimed Matt.  
  
“Since I first helped you out with it. And I’m not your business partner, I’m your COO. You’re the CEO while Chris is the CFO in charge of finances and Tom is the Secretary,” Dom waves his hand dismissively. “Oh, and don’t worry about the rent. Chris had checked the books and said that we can afford the rent.”  
  
“Since when did we have titles and started using business jargon?!” exclaimed Matt again, his lunch well forgotten at this point.  
  
“Well, since now,” Dom says like it’s obvious in plain sight. “And if you’re not going to eat your fish and chips, can I have it?”  
  
At least with a bigger operation at hand, that means he can get some classmates who are good at maths to do the bookkeeping for him.  
  
There were not only his classmates helping him with it, for soon after, there were adults involved as well. Thanks to a loophole that was noticed by Tom which should have been looked through by an eagle-eyed lawyer to avoid the scenario turned reality, and several people who have approached Matt that he suspects have worked or are working in the fishery industry, Matt finds that he has adults who were more than happy to be employed as consultants in his business or volunteer their time there.  
  
Within a few days, there were adults to help alongside his classmates to sort through the fishes. There were adults with freezer trucks to do the deliveries where bikes can’t reach and go to other fishing docks to pick up the supplies of bycatch in Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, and even as far as Wales to bring to the warehouse to be sorted, packed, and sold off.   
  
And for the first time since he started his silly business of selling fish, he has people that can descale and fillet the fishes to sell them for the customer’s convenience.  
  
Matt’s fishery business benefited many sides. It benefited his friends and classmates in having a proper salary to earn and learn a trade skill that can come in handy once they leave school. It benefited the adults working in the fishery industry to find out that several fishes that were thought of as bycatch that Matt had been selling were actual potentials to be commercially viable and can replace certains types of commercial fishes that have been overfished.  
  
Several types of fishes such as the Atlantic wolffish became a good replacement for cod for the fish and chip shops to buy in bulk. Fresh shellfishes have recently been introduced into the catalogue from where the trucks have picked up from. There was even a celebrity chef from some city or town that came down to their warehouse to see and buy their stock.  
  
When the fishermen’s strike was over within three weeks and supply runs slowly came back to normal that the panic has stopped, although Matt’s business operation continued on a larger scale than a sixteen year old can fathom to run, and it continued on like this towards the end of the school term. By the time things have winded down, Matt has earned more money than even the highest earning entrepreneur student in the whole school who was selling homemade cakes and hot cross buns.  
  
At the end of the school term, during the assembly, Matt is awarded the Spirit of Entrepreneurship for not only for his business acumen, but also for introducing the town as a whole towards diversifying on their seafood diet beyond just the fishes normally consumed by the majority and having a legitimately successful company. There are even news reporters doing interviews with him and his mugshot was in the newspapers, both local and national.  
  
Matt is not sure whether he should be unsurprised that he had won the contest or be annoyed that his plan to fail had failed spectacularly by making him run a successful retail fishmonger instead. He is relieved, though, that his fishmongering days can be considered over and done with.   
  
He is more than happy and relieved to hand his ‘company’ over to some local businessmen interested in it. He doesn’t care what they are going to do with his precious company. They can run it down to the ground for all they want.  
  
The reward money that he gains from the award does smooth things over, however. Combining it with the money he had earned from his former business, he can almost taste the potential of having a new electric guitar and other sorts of equipment for the band!  
  
Besides, it’s not as if he is going tell to people that starting Rocket Baby Dolls and then later Muse was possible thanks to a silly fishery business that he started out because he was forced into some yearlong project that he participated.  
  
Unfortunately for Matt, because he handed his ‘company’ over to those who wanted to properly invest in it to contribute to the community of Teignmouth, his fishery business didn’t disappear so much as it continued on long after the founder no longer wanted to have anything to do with it.   
  
It later became a multi-million pound company with diverse commercial seafood products both fresh and processed that employs dozens of people in Teignmouth and the surrounding villages and is a certified business that continues its founder’s aim to introduce a wider variety of seafood to the British palate.   
  
And much to Matt’s consternation, more than two decades on, he still gets a cut of the profit from a share from the company thanks to being its founder and reminds him every month with a check that his company is still alive and kicking. His bandmates, however, who also still have their shares are more positive about it.


End file.
